All posts tagged hexmap-editor

Bolting Scalatra on to the existing hexmap project turned out to be fairly easy, though I had the advantage of having an existing minimal project already (the nascent random-album-cover project). My idea for this project is to have nearly all the server transactions handled through Ajax rather than form posts and server-side templating, but while I was getting the directory structure up and running I took the opportunity to translate the existing HTML that I developed for the hexmap into Jade.

My initial impulse, actually, was to use Mustache, and avoid rewriting the HTML altogether. However, I found the layout documentation for scalate Mustache to be basically incomprehensible, and if I’m understanding it correctly, it requires you to insert extra stuff into your layout file and still not remove anything from your content file, which doesn’t exactly seem like it’s heading in the right direction as far as templating system design. Besides, using Jade lets me pretend that I live in a universe where SGML-derived syntaxes never became something that almost every working programmer would have to deal with almost every day.

The downside of this is that I’m no longer able to monkey with the client-side code without a running jetty instance, but I think that should be OK for the near future. The upside is that the code for index.html has shrank down to a svelte 36 lines.

At any rate, I’ve got the client code retrieving and painting a map from the server now. My server-side map database currently looks like this:

It’s a start. I’ve also pulled in the Lift-JSON libraries, which look to be useful. The next step is to implement a few different map stores, hook them up to the client, and test the output. After that, I need to figure out a way to populate actually interesting map data in a persistent store (presumably Mongo). The idea which keeps nagging at the back of my mind is that the existing code could probably be used as the start of a dynamic map editor, but I’m not positive I want to head down that route.